You've Been Heard

In Episode 435 of You've Been Heard, Doug Camin speaks with Stephen Hightower about a career that spans aerospace and defense, information security, quality engineering, private equity consulting, YETI Coolers, and technology leadership at Harmar.

Stephen explains why cycle time, service quality, and unit cost are the three metrics he uses to understand whether a business process is working. The conversation moves through private equity speed, order-to-cash thinking, Lean Six Sigma, master data, ERP and CRM discipline, AI decision quality, proactive monitoring, and the need for IT leaders to earn trust through transparency.

Stephen's through line is clear: technology should not be treated as a cost center when it can remove waste, improve customer experience, and help the business make better decisions.

In Episode 434 of You've Been Heard, Phil Howard speaks with Tim McCrosson about a career that moved from dot-com era web development into federal IT leadership, policy, cybersecurity, and large-scale operations.

Tim explains how an early leadership correction changed him from a command-and-control project manager into a more sustainable coach and collaborator, while also showing why leaders still need the right style for the moment.

The conversation moves through CIO authority in the federal government, laptop refresh policy, the use-or-lose budget problem, enterprise depot operations, pandemic-era network consolidation, SASE risk reduction, AI in acquisition, and the danger of chasing AI without a clear business case.

Tim's through line is simple: technology can be powerful, but it works best when leaders manage up, manage down, build trust, and keep people at the center.

In Episode 433 of You've Been Heard, Mike Kelley speaks with Alex Vasilescu about the path from service desk work to global IT service delivery leadership. Alex shares lessons from major incident management, ITIL-driven operations, ServiceNow optimization, and the current pressure organizations feel around AI adoption. The conversation centers on a practical point: AI can create value, but not by rushing. Companies need clear use cases, organized data, governance, security, and a realistic implementation pace before technology can truly improve service delivery and customer experience.

Mike Kelley speaks with Jesse Crane, Vice President Information Technology at Argon Medical Devices. Jesse traces a career that started in finance and accounting, moved through Y2K, Oracle ERP, Silicon Valley startups, Stanford, Stryker, master data, business partnering, cybersecurity, and ultimately the VP seat.

The conversation focuses on how IT earns trust inside the business, why being in the room is different from being accepted as a peer, and why AI should not be used to make broken processes faster. Jesse brings the perspective of a leader who understands budgets, operations, security, data, and the human side of change.

Kevin Neureuter, Jr. brings a supply-chain, public-sector, managed-services, and business-ownership perspective to IT leadership. In this episode, he talks with Michael Moore about moving from reactive support to proactive leadership, translating IT decisions into owner-level options, using frameworks like ITIL and ISO 20000 without getting buried in process, and building AI governance that creates guardrails instead of denial. Kevin also explains why the next 18 months will be messy for IT leaders, and why awareness, backups, disaster recovery, and the ability to pivot matter more than fear.

Kevin Neureuter, Jr., Director of IT at DiMarco Group, joins Michael Moore to explain why modern IT should be understood as revenue protection, not overhead.

Kevin brings a supply-chain, public-sector, managed-services, and business-ownership perspective to IT leadership. The conversation covers moving from reactive support to proactive leadership, translating IT decisions into owner-level options, using frameworks like ITIL and ISO 20000 without getting buried in process, and building AI governance that creates guardrails instead of denial.

Kevin also explains why the next 18 months will be messy for IT leaders, and why awareness, backups, disaster recovery, and the ability to pivot matter more than fear.

Michael Baillargeon brings a telecom and contact-center lens to the AI strategy conversation. He argues that companies should stop treating AI like a SKU and start treating it like an operating practice. The episode covers practical quick wins in call recordings and quality management, the risk of public GPT use, the role of LLM aggregators, why data cleanup matters, and the five-part sequence IT leaders can use to move from AI pressure to measurable business outcomes: stakeholders, outcomes, data, guardrails, and ROI.

Jose Young, CTO at Beyond Air and founder of BrightPeak AI Solutions, and Luis Oliveira, Director at T4 Guidance Measurement, compare what carries across industries and what has to be learned from the ground up. They talk through early programming days, hurricanes, cloud recovery, COVID-era healthcare technology, stakeholder buy-in, SAP and manufacturing realities, and the rush toward AI. The strongest lesson is blunt: IT earns trust when it solves business pain, learns the operation, and avoids becoming the hammer looking for a nail.

Cody Aldinger is VP of IT at KLJ, managing technology for 30 offices across the US. He's learned that a huge part of his job isn't technology—it's sales. Convincing business leaders that IT is worth listening to.

His AI philosophy cuts through the hype: "The word hallucination is a fancy word for flat out wrong." He's focused on practical governance, teaching context over button-clicking, and using AI as a thought partner.

We get into the gap between AI expectations and reality, why throwing AI at bad processes just makes them faster, and the pricing disaster nobody's talking about. Cody shares how he's rolling out Microsoft Copilot to 650 employees while keeping guardrails in place.

The biggest takeaway? People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. In the AI world, that means listening first, understanding the real problem, then figuring out if AI is even the right tool for the job.

Eric Brosius, Vice President of IT at Sun River Health, joins Mike Kelley to talk about the real pressure behind healthcare technology leadership. He shares how his team supports multiple entities with different risk profiles, what COVID demanded from healthcare IT, why AI governance now has to account for PHI and vendor behavior, and how leaders build teams that answer the 4AM database call. The conversation is a grounded look at AI, compliance, process discipline, and the invisible work that keeps care moving.